Style

Before you begin to imagine how your character would look, the style you’ll aim for has to be defined. In this case, let’s opt for a cartoony look. The reason for this is that while you’ll learn the full animation process, we don’t want to make Jim so complex that his animated character is hard to achieve. So for learning purposes, Jim will have smooth shapes without too many details.

We’ll keep him simple, but we still want him to look cool. You can go for something more realistic, something dark, or even kind of abstract; just decide ahead of time and create some drawings, or find some photos or other materials to help you determine his style, as this will be essential to how the character ultimately looks.

Something else you want to keep on the table while you define the style (and every other thing that has to do with the appearance of a character) is technical limitations. For example, you might not want to have really long hair on a character, as it will make the animation or simulations much more complex.

Also, style depends on the medium in which the character will be used. In movies, you can use more detail and complexity, as there will be time to render each frame, but if you’re working on a videogame character, the limitations are greater, as the character needs to work in real time, so you would need to use fewer polygons, less resolution in textures, or less complicated effects in order to increase the performance and allow a computer (or a console) to render the images in real time.